Twitter

Twitter is great for making friends and sharing links, but researchers are also increasingly using it to study human interactions. This is more difficult than it sounds, since privacy settings and caps on server access can make it hard to gather research data from social networking sites.

It'd be much easier to have a virtual Twitter for researchers to experiment on, like a kind of 140-character lab rat. So Vijay Erramilli and colleagues at Telefonica Research, Spain have built one.